Caveat Lector: Mark Geier reviews Richard Lathe’s book
The March 2007 issue of Lancet Neurology contains a review by “MR Geier,” of a book by Richard Lathe. The book, Evolving views on the causes of autistic spectrum disorders—-as the February 24th Guardian notes—”flatters the views of the growing fringe autism movement on speculative biological causes and treatments for the condition.” The Lancet Neurology review is “certainly very flattering.”
No surprise here: The reviewer is Mark Geier, the American doctor and anti-vaccine activist who is a “highly criticised expert witness in vaccine cases” and “promotes the idea that mercury in vaccines causes autism, and that testosterone is somehow also implicated.” Along with his son, David Geier, Mark Geier does research on vaccines and autism; David Geier is the president of MedCon which, as Casewatch notes, is a “medical–legal consulting firm that helps vaccine injury claimants to try to obtain funds from both the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and through civil litigation.”
In other words, the reviewer is not exactly an unbiased critic of the book.
Further: The author of the book, Richard Lathe, formerly a professor at Edinburgh University and now of Pieta Research, is also the author of Autism, Brain and Environment, a book which elies on “extremely haphazard science” (see this review on Left Brain/Right Brain; Action for Autism contains a thorough analysis, and questioning, of what Lathe calls “New Phrase Autism”).
This background, the Bad Science in the Guardian notes, is not indicated in the Lancet Neurology review. Notes the Guardian:
As I say, I’m not hostile to people like Geier having a voice. And the idea that there might be a biological cause, or treatment, for autism is a seductive and interesting one. All I ask is that when you take someone as far out as Geier, and bung him in an academic journal reviewing a slightly maverick book, you owe your readers a tiny bit of a warning.
Indeed: Why is an academic journal allowing someone who is on the “medical fringe” to review such a “slightly maverick book,” and a book that argues for a biological cause for autism? It seems a little more disclosure is in order.
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POSTED IN: Books, Environment, Health, Science, Treatment, Vaccines
6 opinions for Caveat Lector: Mark Geier reviews Richard Lathe’s book
Club 166
Feb 25, 2007 at 10:16 pm
Looks like Lancet, a very respected British medical journal, really dropped the ball on this one.
The reality of these things is that book reviews are one of those “busy work” kind of non-paying jobs that usually the journal is grateful someone is doing for them.
Usually an associate editor will know someone who knows someone who can do the review for the journal. Usually this symptom works out fine, but sometimes (especially with a controversial topic like this) the journal can blunder.
Kristina Chew, PhD
Feb 25, 2007 at 10:23 pm
Any possibility that the book’s author might have been asked to “recommend” potential reviewers?
Club 166
Feb 26, 2007 at 1:43 am
Any possibility that the book’s author might have been asked to “recommend” potential reviewers?
Possible, but what I’ve run into is that whoever is the associate editor for the particular section that would cover it is asked who to review something. Generally they know somebody that’s known in that area. They may end up asking the author, but I wouldn’t think that they would. Not a big time place like Lancet, anyway.
Club 166
Feb 26, 2007 at 2:15 am
When Mike Stanton wrote the Lancet regarding the review, they told him that the review was commissioned by a junior member of the editorial staff who was unaware of Geier’s history.
paul
Jan 28, 2008 at 12:39 am
The Lancet ceased to be respectable when it published highly suspect numbers on war deaths in Iraq and tried to back it with editorial ranting akin to some anti-war group of the sixties.
Research to Read With Care
Feb 22, 2008 at 12:28 am
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